Keynote Speakers

Yao-Yi Chiang

Historical spatiotemporal datasets are important for a variety
of studies such as cancer and environmental epidemiology,
urbanization, and landscape ecology. However, existing
data sources typically contain only contemporary datasets.
Historical maps hold a great deal of detailed geographic information
at various times in the past. Yet, finding relevant
maps is difficult and the map content are not machine readable.
I envision a map processing, modeling, linking,
and publishing framework that allows querying historical
map collections as a unified and structured spatiotemporal
source in which individual geographic phenomena (extracted
from maps) are modeled with semantic descriptions
and linked to other data sources (e.g., DBpedia). This
framework will make it possible to efficiently study historical
spatiotemporal datasets on a large scale. Realizing such a
framework poses significant research challenges in multiple
fields in computer science including digital map processing,
data integration, and the Semantic Web technologies, and
other disciplines such as spatial, earth, social, and health
sciences. Tackling these challenges will not only advance
research in computer science but also present a unique opportunity
for interdisciplinary research.

For his paper Querying Historical Maps as a Unified, Structured, and Linked Spatiotemporal Source, he won the first place prize at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems 2015 (SIGSPATIAL 2015) in Seattle, Washington.

Yao-Yi Chiang is Assistant Professor of Spatial Sciences in the Spatial Sciences Institute, University of Southern California (USC).
His general area of research is artificial intelligence and data science, with a focus on information integration and spatial data analytics. He develops computer algorithms and applications that discover, collect, fuse, and analyze data from heterogeneous sources to solve real world problems. He teaches data mining, spatial databases, and mobile GIS.
Prior to USC, Chiang worked as a research scientist for Geosemble Technologies (now TerraGo Technologies), which was founded based on a patent of which he was a co-inventor on geospatial-data fusion techniques.

Martijn Storms

Georeferencing by Crowdsourcing: The Maps in the Crowd-project of Leiden University Libraries

Leiden University Libraries

Leiden University Libraries holds a vast collection of c. 100,000 maps and 3,500 atlases. To make these map better accessible and searchable, the georeferencing of the map collection has started. Moreover, georeferenced maps can be used and analysed further in Geographical Information Systems. With the well-known Georeferencer application of Klokan Technologies, everyone who is interested could contribute to this project online. After a pilot project in 2015, consisting of c. 400 18th century manuscript charts of the Van Keulen collection, almost 7,000 Dutch colonial maps of the KITLV collection (Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies) were made available for georeferencing. In eight months' time all maps were georeferenced by the crowd. At this moment a third phase of Maps in the Crowd is in preparation, with c. 1,000 maps of the Caribbean in general and the Netherlands Antilles in particular.

This talk will focus on the crowdsourcing aspects of the project. How did we reach people who were interested to contribute? What kind of PR activities did we develop to bring the project to the attention? Who are the people who participated? And how did we kept them satisfied? The project cannot be dissociated from the broader digital revolution in the academic and librarian world. Leiden University Libraries is developing a Center for Digital Scholarship to assist researchers and students in all aspects of digital scholarship. At the same time the library is creating a new repository infrastructure to manage and display its digital and digitised collections. Maps in the Crowd perfectly fits in this larger development.

Martijn Storms MA (Arnhem, 1978), is curator of maps and atlases at Leiden University Libraries. Besides, he is project coordinator at Brill publishers and member of the editing board of Caert-Thresoor, the Dutch journal on the history of cartography. Martijn Storms studied GIS and cartography at Utrecht University.